AMD Athlon 64 FX-57: Sunny San Diego
LAME & Cinebench 2003
In our custom Lame MP3 encoding test, we convert a large digital audio file to the MP3 format, which is a very popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. In this test, we chose a large 223MB WAV file (a never-ending Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format. We utilized the latest 3.97 version of the Lame executable and encoding DLL for this test. Processing times are recorded below. Shorter times equate to better performance.
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The new Athlon 64 FX-57 continued its winning ways with our custom LAMP MP3 encoding benchmark. It's updated memory controller and clock speed advantage allowed it to surge ahead of the previous top dog, the Athlon 64 FX-55, by a full 9 seconds. It also outpaced the fastest Intel processor in this test by 16 seconds. This may not sound like much, but a few seconds here an there add up to minutes or hours saved when ripping an entire collection of CDs.
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We ran two sets of numbers with Cinebench, one in single-thread mode and another in the benchmark's multi-thread mode. Please note that single-core Athlon 64s are only capable of running the single-thread test, hence the missing blue bar graphs in the chart below for all but the new Athlon 64 X2 CPU. Hyper-Threading-enabled Pentium 4 and Dual Core Pentium EE 840 processors, as well as the new Athlon 64 X2 4800+, are fully capable of running this test in its multi-thread mode, however.
Clearly, Cinebench 2003 runs much faster in its multi-thread mode, as is evident by the sub-45 second times posted by the Pentium EE 840 and Athlon 64 X2 4800+, but the Athlon 64 FX-57 still performed incredibly well in this test. The FX-57's time-to-complete of 66.3 seconds was, by far, the fastest, non-overclocked, single threaded time we have ever seen in this test.
